Trump Embraces the Moral Ambiguity of a Halfway War - BY: David Rohde

Afghanistan is a bloodbath for Afghan soldiers, policemen, and civilians, not for American service members.

The most jarring words in Donald Trump’s Afghanistan speech on Monday night were some of the least noticed. “In this struggle, the heaviest burden will continue to be borne by the good people of Afghanistan and their courageous armed forces,” Trump said, expressing, for the first time that I can remember, something positive about Muslims. In Trumpian fashion, the praise was followed by warnings that “our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check.” The grudging goodwill potentially marked an incremental change in Trump’s thinking. Or, more likely, it was a phrase inserted by an adviser that Trump was talked into uttering.

Increasingly, Afghanistan is a bloodbath for Afghan soldiers, policemen, and civilians, not for American service members. Afghan casualty rates are higher than at any other point in the country’s sixteen-year war, with an average of thirty-one Afghan soldiers and police, and nine civilians, perishing per day. All told, six thousand Afghan soldiers, and three thousand five hundred Afghan civilians, died in violence last year. During the same period, fourteen American service members were killed in Afghanistan.

The rest of Trump’s speech followed the same pattern as most of his speeches about the Middle East: the fight against terrorism is by, for, and about Americans, and Americans alone. “Since my Inauguration, we have achieved record-breaking success,” Trump said, praising the retaking of Mosul without mentioning that Iraqis made up the vast majority of the forces that drove ISIS from the city in the worst house-to-house fighting since the Second World War. In Trump’s comments, Iraqis, Afghans, and the citizens of other predominantly Muslim countries are often portrayed as cheating the U.S. As with every other complex governmental challenge, Trump vows he will fix it through force of will.
“One way or another, these problems will be solved,” Trump vowed, blithely reversing five years of promises to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. “I’m a problem solver—and, in the end, we will win.”

Then, with the forced cadence that comes when he reads from a teleprompter, Trump laid out a strategy that, in broad terms, mirrored that of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Pressure Afghans to end corruption. Pressure Pakistan to stop backing the Taliban. Embrace India. He proposed, in short, a continuation of an endless halfway war. With American, Afghan, and Taliban forces all lacking the military power to decisively win the conflict, it grinds on. Trump added Trumpian touches, such as loosening air-strike rules designed to minimize civilian casualties, but the rest is “Groundhog Day.”

“Apart from Jacksonian rhetoric, we are pretty much in the same place we have been for the past sixteen years, with a few tweaks,” Rick Olson, a career diplomat who served as the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2015 to 2016, told me after the speech. “The only real change is simply that Trump is no longer in favor of withdrawal.”

The unveiling of Trump’s muddle-through strategy showed that his campaign promises about Afghanistan were as illusory as his oaths to bring back high-paying manufacturing jobs, solve health care, and fill America with a sense of pride. In one of the more honest reactions to the speech, the former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Washington Post that the strategy was to minimize American casualties in Afghanistan to the point where few Americans would care. “The fact is, if you slow down the casualty rate and you’re not losing young Americans, the American people will support gradually growing allies for a long time,” Gingrich told the Post, referring to long-term American troop presences in Germany, Japan, and Korea.

An American military officer who recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan told me that pressure to minimize American casualties had made it extremely difficult for U.S. military trainers to make progress in the country. “We couldn’t even drive anywhere unless we had helicopters flying overhead to attack anything that attacked us,” the officer, who asked not to be named, told me. “Any little hiccup and the mission got completely scrapped.” A story by the Post’s Thomas Gibbons-Neff, on Tuesday, described American marines on a Sisyphean training mission in a remote corner of southern Afghanistan: the Afghan commander of the unit being trained by the marines courageously takes the fight to the Taliban, but the Afghan Army still struggles with the same logistics, personnel, and pay problems as it did when marines trained Afghan forces there in 2010.

“It’s like everyone forgot,” one marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Gibbons-Neff. “Like someone hit the reset button and now we’re out here again saying, ‘We can do this, we can win this thing.’ ”

In the wake of Trump’s decision, Afghans will continue to serve as cannon fodder in a long American-centric effort to secure the U.S. homeland from another 9/11. The moral question of whether admitting defeat, pulling out U.S. troops, and ending the bloodshed is better than continuing to wage a half-hearted military effort has apparently not been examined. Empathizing with Afghans, and Muslims in general, has never been Trump’s strong point. He rose to political power, in part, by vilifying Muslims, including the Afghans he fleetingly praised last night, through tweets:

“It is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.”—February 27, 2012
“Afghanistan is a total disaster. We don’t know what we are doing. They are, in addition to everything else, robbing us blind.”—March 12, 2012
“Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!”—August 21, 2012
“Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.”—January 11, 2013

His tweets were cornerstones of an ugly Trump narrative that Muslims cannot be trusted. Trump famously and falsely claimed, in 2015, that Arabs in New Jersey “were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” After the 2016 Orlando night-club shooting, he called for a “total and complete shutdown on Muslims entering the United States” and falsely claimed that “the Muslim community does not report people like this” to the police. In his first week in office, Trump tried to ban travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries from receiving visas to the United States. (The U.S. Supreme Court will decide the constitutionality of the ban this fall.)

In an opinion poll earlier this year, thirty-eight per cent of American Muslims said that they feared being victimized by white-supremacist groups, a rate higher than members of other religions, Reuters reported. Nearly one in five American Muslims had made plans to leave the United States “if it becomes necessary.” In the same poll, twenty-seven per cent of Jews, eleven per cent of Protestants, and eight per cent of Roman Catholics mentioned similar fears. Forty-two per cent of Muslims said that their children had been bullied in school because of their faith, four times the rate of the general population. Teachers were involved in twenty-five per cent of the cases, according to the survey.
Acknowledging the frustrations and hopes of American Muslims, or of Afghans, of course, will not stabilize countries or counter extremist groups. Trump’s predecessors unsuccessfully tried to do so in vastly different ways. George W. Bush declared that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” But the invasion of Iraq only worsened the country and region’s sectarian divisions. Minimizing the use of American military power in the Middle East, Obama called for “A New Beginning” between the United States and Muslims around the world in a nuanced 2009 speech in Cairo that recognized the political, economic, and historical forces roiling the region. But the Arab Spring devolved into state suppression, sectarianism, and the emergence of the Islamic State.

There is a small chance that Trump’s decision to continue a halfway war in Afghanistan is the result of careful deliberation. In his speech, Trump said that he had “studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle.” H. R. McMaster, who is Trump’s national-security adviser and a military historian, may have convinced the President of the limits of American military power. Maybe Trump, who touts his ability to keep military secrets, has found a secret middle ground between the invasions of Bush and the caution of Obama. Given the staggering number of Afghans dying each day, I hope, in all sincerity, that Trump has. But I fear that he has not.